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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

Discover Weekly works really well for me. It surfaces a lot of music I've forgotten about and for the most part provides an interesting collection to listen to. Having said that, I have a very eclectic taste in music, so it's probably harder to hit on things I won't like. My process is to try to listen to it several times through and then pick out the stand out tracks once everything has had a chance to grow on me.

One thing I worry about with it though is how much my behaviour might influence the choices. For example, if there's a track in there that I already know quite well, because I like it, I'm often scared of skipping it in case the algorithm takes that as a massive negative signal.

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In terms of behavior influence, I listened to pretty much exclusively Hamilton for like a month and didn't get very many new Broadway or hip-hop songs (which is good for me because I tend to not really listen to either genre). So there must be significant weight given to songs/genres you've historically listened to a lot.

Or, based on the way the algorithms work, people that listen to the Hamilton soundtrack a lot, don’t listen to hiphop/broadway a lot.

Same. Also, anytime I get a bad recommendation I blame my daughter for wanting to listen to the Frozen soundtrack.

Time to introduce her to Moana for a change of pace.

Interestingly (and now very off topic), she hasn't even seen Frozen. She does not yet know it is a film AFAIK, and I'm in no hurry to tell her.

I believe that the concept of Frozen has been explained to her by her peer group, through the medium of hair plaits.

Three year old kids are a weird and amazing bunch.

Thinking about it a little more, we've listened to a lot of Moana / Frozen / Disney on my Spotify account and none of that has come up in the Discover Weekly, so I guess they filter for it somehow already. Though I guess when they compare to other people with the same tracks you'll probably get a bunch of listeners that fall into a similar category anyway. Also, it doesn't sound like the number of times you play a track adds a huge amount of weight anyway.

Wrt fear of sending signals, I feel the same.

Also, I have a young daughter who often asks me to play music in the car or Google Home and those affect my recommendations. I wish Spotify had some switch I could turn on to temporarily ignore anything I did until I switched it back off.

What you're after is what they call 'private listening' or 'private session': https://support.spotify.com/cz/using_spotify/the_basics/how-...

Oh I didn’t know that! Awesome! Thank you.

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